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Big Data, Privacy, and the U.S. Intelligence Workforce

17 December 2018

Time: 12:30-1:30 pm

Venue: The Alan Turing Institute, London.

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This talk will discuss privacy issues involving the use of a self-tracking ‘Journaling’ application by U.S. intelligence workers. We conducted interviews about the technology with intelligence practitioners at the NSA-funded Laboratory for Analytic Sciences in order to explore what benefits and concerns they had regarding the technology, and explore their thoughts on how it might be deployed in their intelligence workplace. The interviews revealed some interesting and curious commentaries about worker priorities and anxieties within contemporary intelligence work that help us to better explore privacy values in this unique work setting. For our analysis, we primarily draw on Helen Nissenbaum’s heuristic of contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2009) to better situate how to make sense of intelligence analyst privacy concerns and to also help inform design and management principles in future development of the Journaling application as a technology for helping intelligence workers improve their productivity. We then postulate how the lessons learned from the study could also be applied to other types of knowledge workers.